Simone Weil reported German penury was destroying society’s fabric

Evidence

When Raymond Aron first arrived in 1930, his shock immediately turned into a question: how could Europe avoid being drawn into another war? Two years later, the young French philosopher Simone Weil travelled through the country and reported back to a left-wing newspaper on how penury and unemployment were destroying the fabric of German society. Those who had jobs were haunted by the fear of losing them. People who could not afford homes became vagabonds or relied on relatives to put them up, which strained family relationships to their limits. Catastrophe could strike anyone; ‘you see elderly men in stiff collars and bowler hats begging at subway exits or singing in cracked voices in the streets.’ The old suffered, while the young, who had never known anything else, did not even have good memories to escape into. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 253

Categorization

• SHARE: Weil’s 1932 dispatch — ‘elderly men in stiff collars and bowler hats begging at subway exits’ — would be perfect for someone reading Weil or writing about the pre-Nazi moment.
• XREF: connects to: Simone Weil predicted Nazism’s aesthetic appeal would beat socialism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 254